


The Things He Takes From Us

by MalcolmInSpace



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hell, Mild Gore, Post-Episode: s02e05 Mukozuke, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Pre-Season/Series 03, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 00:35:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4120111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmInSpace/pseuds/MalcolmInSpace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short drabble set between S2 and 3. Will in the hospital visits an old friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Things He Takes From Us

The room was quiet, dark, pregnant with the night. Machines beeped softly, slowly keeping time for the music of the hospital, the susurrus of voices and managed pain and worry and sometimes even a brief crest of someone leaving, a rogue wave that washed itself upon the beach and then receded, leaving only flotsam and eroded castles.

Will Graham leaned back, breathed as deeply and steadily as he could, and waited for the nightmares. They slipped back and forth across the liminal spaces of opiate stupor and the line of fire etched across his belly. Shadows heaved and slurped and coagulated in the places he wasn’t looking and whispered to him.

“Hello, Will.”

They were standing on a precipice overlooking a cracked and feverish plain. The wind blew up at them, hot and heavy. Will felt the dust on his skin like sandpaper, wearing down into his cracks and shattered self.

“Hello, Will.”

“Hello, Beverly.”

She was standing just a few from him, looking how he wanted to remember her, half-smile like she knew something. The Katz who caught the canary. Only it wasn’t a canary, was it? “This place isn’t for you, Will. Not yet.”

Below them, on the plain, a lone figure staggered along.

Will tried a smile, and a generous person might call it one. “I think I’m halfway here already. And that’s on a good day. I’ve walked through those gates to drag things back and you know what it says over them.”

“You could turn around. You still can.”

The wind curled around them more insistently, chafing raw fingers of blown grit and furnace hear across their necks and ears and wounds. Out across the plain a storm wall was building, a cathedral sweep of inexorable mass chased with red lightning.

“Turn around, Will. Walk back out.” Beverly wasn’t smiling any more. Her lips were beginning to turn blue, as though for her the wind blew cold. Perhaps it did. Maybe this time that’s all it was, a cold wind. Maybe.

“I can’t turn around now, Beverly. I’ve taken things from here. I’ve eaten the food. If I try to walk away now... to be a pillar of salt would be peaceful, I suppose. To observe without capacity for involvement, perhaps that is all the rest I can look forwards to.”

The figure on the plain was stumbling faster towards the storm front now. Will could see with the clarity of a dream the figure’s head twisted all the way around. Franklyn, lumbering forever into a danger he was incapable of seeing.

“Isn’t that the final coercion, though? To be left forever in a place of seeing, unable to move.” Frost was forming across her face, now. Please not this time.

“I suppose you would know.”

“I do.” There was a line appearing down Beverly’s face, sending small slivers of frost afloat in the wind.

Franklyn was swept in the storm and torn apart. He did not understand why. He never would. It would happen again and again and he would never understand.

“I know why I’m here, Beverly. Why are you? You walked around, not through.”

“It’s not about what I did, Will.” With a sound like cold fingers on your neck when you thought you were alone, she came apart, each fragment gliding laterally with slaughterhouse precision and in the spaces between Will could see all the other victims, torn and reformed. Playthings. Art. People. Food. Each slice of her heart beat in erratic, asymmetrical sympathy like drummers who cannot hear each other trying to play a half-remembered rhythm. “It’s not what I did, Will. It’s what he took from me. I am not whole, Will, none of us are. We are tied here because we are all tied to him, part of him. We cannot leave until we are whole, Will. Help us, Will. Make us whole, Will. Find what took, Will. Help us, Will. Help us Will. HELP US WILL. MAKE US WHOLE, WILL. HELP US-’

Will lurched awake and fire tore through his body. He gasped, heaved, clawed at his face with sweat-slick fingers. This is _his_ design, the consequence of rubbing wrongly against a soul like sharkskin, a thousand dentricles digging into Will Graham. Will hopes he will dream of a river and the quiet breeze and a smiling face. He won’t.

Beverly Katz stood on a cliff overlooking a cracked and feverish plain, watching Franklyn stumble into the storm again and again. A clutching wind swarmed over the cliff and whistled through Beverly, caressing the space between and the place where there wasn’t something and eddied into the place where he had taken away.

Somewhere, far away, there was dancing.


End file.
